Twilight of the WASPs

Both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer come from refugee families.

David Cameron is an aristocratic Scottish Unionist such as dominated the politics of Scotland until well into the post-War period.

George Osborne is an aristocratic Irish Unionist such as dominated the politics of Ireland and then of Northern Ireland until the General Election of February 1974, 40 years ago yesterday; if anything, they retain more of a hold in the 26 Counties than they do in the Six, but still nothing approaching that which was enjoyed by Osborne’s fairly recent ancestors and their caste.

Well within living memory in several cases, and still within it in all of them, previously impregnable WASP oligarchies have been brought down on four continents, not by their formal enemies, but by the clients through whom they had previously exercised untrammelled power.

Consider the United Party of South Africa. Consider the Liberal Party, and to an extent even the National Party, in the Australia of the 1970s or even later, and then consider them, especially the Liberals, today. Consider the Republican Party before and after Nixon, Reagan, Buchanan, the forces around Bush the Younger (even though he himself is WASP royalty play-acting a part), and then the Tea Party. Consider Canada.

Consider the Ulster Unionist Party. Consider the Scottish Unionist Party. And consider the Conservative Party before and after first Powellism (also a contributing factor in the emergence of the DUP as dominant, with Jeffrey Donaldson as the key linkman), and then Thatcherism.

The present situation looks like a reversion to the old order. But it is a swansong, pointedly headed by a Scottish Unionist émigré and by an Irish Unionist émigré, who is quite possibly the next Leader of the Conservative Party.

There is no comparison with the days of Alec Douglas-Home and of the Ulster Unionist grandees who took his Whip, since those were figures capable of being elected in Scotland and Northern Ireland, and indeed of dominating the politics of those places.

Most English-speaking constituencies in South Africa ended up electing National Party MPs, and the rest went to small liberal or liberal-ish parties that were in any case partly associated with a certain outsider status, notably that of Helen Suzman’s Jewishness. The anti-apartheid movement did eventually defeat the National Party, but it had been the National Party that had defeated the WASP elite long before that.

There is still a Unionist majority in Northern Ireland. It is the Ulster Unionist Party that has as good as gone away; the party of the drawling Lord Brookeborough and Sir Terence O’Neill, the Red Hand his family symbol and that fact the only way of connecting his name to anything else about him. In that form, that party has gone away entirely. It has been defeated. But not by Irish Nationalism.

The Australian Labor Party and the Labour Party in Scotland, each with close links to the Catholic Church and to a wider Irish subculture behind that, did not defeat the Australian Liberals or the Scottish Unionists.

The Irish Catholics largely took over the Liberals, something that beggars belief when set within even an extremely recent historical context, and still not to be overstated, in that the personal opinions of someone like Tony Abbott are still not necessarily party policy, just as his economic and geopolitical views, which are, are not compatible with Catholic orthodoxy. The anti-Labour vote in Scotland is as large as ever, and more dominant than at any time since 1964. It is just that it now goes to the SNP.

Such is the kind of right-wing populism that replaced the Canadian Tories and the Ulster Unionists wholesale, that replaced the Country Club Republicans and the old Australian Liberals to a very considerable extent, that took over the Conservative Party from the middle of the 1970s onwards, and that is now deserting it in its neo-Macmillanite phase, to the impending electoral doom of both.

But to where will the Camerons and the Osbornes run then?